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Well, these past few weeks have certainly been busy. Mileage was low, but punctuated by some interesting workouts and my first ever track race which was less than stellar, through no fault of my own.

Around all of this have been heavy duty work demands (on top of my M-F gig, a new freelance client with a lot of work that had to be done very quickly — lots of juggling and long hours there), plus my entré into running journalism, plus much work preparing to launch my new side project, Houston Hopefuls (see glaring banner in the upper right hand corner of this page), plusmeeting my Vermont Relay teammates, plus strange, unidentifiable car parts actually falling off the bottom of my car. Seriously. The shit has been hitting the fan in a big way. But mostly in a good way.

The training has been one of the least demanding aspects of these past two weeks. Here it is. I won’t go into excruciating details because I’ve been wrestling with hand-coded HTML in WordPress (okay, Jonathan’s wrestled with it as I stood over him giving direction) all day and trying to figure out how to set up domain-specific email addresses. One minor triumph was finally figuring out how to podcast using Skype to record MP3s of phone conversations. I’d tried TalkShoe, but rejected it as it’s a proprietary format and you can’t edit the files. Now I’m going native. MP3 native, that is.

I was given two speed sessions earlier in the month to help prepare me for a mile race on the track. These were both really fun sessions. The first was a short set of cutdowns, with the last one having no assigned pace other than to “floor it.”

A few days later I did my first ever session of 300’s and holy crap were those fun. Much easier than 400’s. I got up at an ungodly hour to do those before heading into the city for a NYRR press event for the Healthy Kidney 10K, which resulted in two articles, one about the competitive elites and the other about Khalid Khannouchi’s comeback.

The first one made the front page of LetsRun.com and, shortly thereafter, was also linked as a daily news headline on Track and Field News’ website. No one has picked up the Khannouchi story, so maybe they’re sick of me already.

The next day I went in with Jonathan to watch the elites (and him) race. This one was his debut as a Warren Street member and he did well, placing 4th in his AG (those club points races are competitive) and helping to put Warren St. in 2nd place for the men’s 50+ team scoring in this race.

Jonathan appears startled at the end of this race verité clip from Joe. Also note the none-too-subtle dig at the New York Harriers.

Then some quicker recovery runs (they are getting faster) during the week. Yesterday I did a run I haven’t done in at least a couple of years, one that I call the Yonkers Lungbuster. Yonkers is very hilly. If you want to put together a good hill run, it’s very easy to do. I ran just under 7 miles, climbing a total of 1,400 ft. My HR showed it too, averaging 86% for an 8:27 pace. It was warm and humid, which pushed it up. Still, it was a very satisfying run and it seemed to prime me for running reasonably fast again today.

This morning’s run was done along a three mile loop that circles Rockland Lake, about a half an hour northwest of our house, over the Chimpan Zee Bridge. Jonathan ran a 10K race up there. In fact, he won it in a time of 36:28. For his efforts he received an ugly trophy and a basket of Swiss skincare products. If he didn’t live with me, they’d have gone straight into the garbage. But because I’ll use anything that’s free, I’ll be slathering these expensive products on myself for weeks to come.

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8 Responses

Congrats to Jonathan for the race and you for getting to use the funky winnings. Great couple of weeks, Julie! So much going on in your life – aside from falling car parts, sounds like a good period for you.

What was your Yonkers route? Also I plan on doing the B’ville Running Co. thing Wed. at 7. The guy who ran 15:30 or so at Loucks will be there, assuring a good pace (I hope there’ll be others) so you and JS might want to stop by. I had a good chat with him on Sunday. It’d be my first time.

I’ll try to summarize the run: Scarsdale Road to southern end of Crestwood Ave. Run all the way up to Juana and turn left, going back to Scarsdale Rd. Then run up Crisfield (got, this one is a total bastard of a hill), then at the crest you turn right onto Falmouth and run up yet some more. Wind your way around those streets (I get lost, but it’s all hills, so it doesn’t matter), then come back down Falmouth to Crisfield. Run toward Central Park Ave, but turn left at Eisenhower and run through the housing complex, again wending your way up into Colonial Heights via Grandview. Right onto Verona to get some downhill work in. Left on Helena, then take the diagonal back up to Grandview. Over the little bump to La Salle, down to Cliffside and you’re home (or at least at our home). You can tack on more by going down to Parkview and running up that curvy road (can’t remember what it’s called — but there’s a very grand house on the hill that used to belong to Gloria Swanson). That is also quite a hill. But not as bad as Crisfield/Falmouth.

Got it. That sounds pretty tough with ups and downs throughout, esp. that ball-busting (can I say that on the Internet?) one up Crisfield. I know many of the early roads — Crestwood was part of my standard ride to White Plains — but not so much after that. But it’s “Central Avenue,” no “Park” notwithstanding what the signs say.

For the record, my sole encounter with NY Harriers was at the 2006 Reach-the-Beach. By the end, our van was close to one of theirs. As I ran leg 25, a Harriers van was in a parking lot by the course and those folks were very supportive, and I am still grateful for it.